Soups and Stews

Italian Wedding Soup It's a Keeper

Italian Wedding Soup

In the winter, I have a love affair with soup.  It tickles my fancy and it warms my soul.  OK, I don’t know about the soul part, but it makes me feel good and I love it!

I especially love soups that are full of hearty goodness.  Lots of veggies.  Rich broth.  And, of course a little cheese doesn’t hurt either!

I have a particular affinity for Italian Wedding Soup.  Maybe it’s my Italian heritage coming through.  Or, maybe it’s because I love the little meatballs?  It’s probably the meatballs!  Until recently, I never made my own Italian Wedding Soup.  I thought it was too complicated.  You have to make a broth and then dozens of little meatballs.  It was one of the dishes that I would rather order out.  Until recently.

I took the best parts (according to me) of several recipes and combined them all to come up with this one.

Pioneer Woman Chili

Simple, Perfect Chili

I read cookbooks like other people read romance novels — cover to cover, absorbing every delicious measurement and instruction as if it were the feud between Edward and Jacob (sorry, I had to throw in the Twilight reference).

As soon as I received my copy of The Pioneer Woman Cooks by Ree Drummond (thank you, Mr. UPS guy), it was no different.  As soon as my son was in bed, I settled down on the couch with a cup of tea to read my new book.  Bliss.

As I was reading through P-Dub’s (cute, huh?!) recipes, artfully intertwined with great stories of her transition from big-city girl to a pioneer woman who works a ranch, I came across her recipe for Simple, Perfect Chili.  Ding! Ding! Ding!  I just found my recipe for the cookbook review!

Chicken with Wild Rice Soup

Creamy Chicken and Wild Rice Soup

I don’t know about you, but here in northeastern PA, it’s downright FRIGID! With the temperatures dipping down into the teens (yes, that’s the HIGH temperature!), it seems to be the perfect time to try out some soup recipes.  I sifted through the pile and came up this recipe. 

Beef Bourguignon

Beef Bourguignon

Or, boeuf bourguignonne (said in my best Julia Child voice).  For those of you that have read my “About” page, you know that I started this blog after watching the movie Julie and Julia.  Except, instead of cooking my way through a cookbook, I’m cooking my way through my (ever growing) pile of collected recipes.  So, I thought it was only appropriate to make this recipe for my one-year-of-blogging milestone.

I read the recipe over and over.  It’s quite long and involved so I wanted to make sure that, A.) I had all of the ingredients and tools that I needed to make the dish and B.) I had an idea about what I was getting myself into.

Chicken Stew with Balsamic Roasted Vegetables

Photo taken by my husband!

For this week’s taste test, I pulled out a recipe that I’ve been dying to try for some time — Chicken Stew with Balsamic Roasted Vegetables.  I came across this recipe in a Taste of Home magazine (October/November 2009) and it found its way into “my pile”!  It appeared that this recipe would take a bit of time to make since I had to roast the vegetables before making the stew.  My plan was to have this as a weeknight dinner so I did a little prep work on Sunday afternoon.

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